Sunday, March 31, 2013

I’ve been accused of being the anti-Chamber of
Commerce for Beijing, but in my defense, I call ‘em as I see ‘em. And sometimes
the truth as rough-edged as China itself.

Today is a good example of both the good and the
stuff that makes for good blog posts. I needed to get to an interview at the
Park Hyatt, which is in the center of the central business district of Beijing.
And it’s a major hotel, so how could this be complicated, right?

I hired (for 30 RMB) what some people call a
carbon-monoxide mobile, a tin-can-enclosed vehicle that is kind of a cross
between a motorcycle surrounded by an aluminum box and a teeny-tiny van.
Sometimes you face forward but most of the time you face backwards. Here’s a
recent ride I took.

And then today I got one that faced forward. The car
seemed to hit every little bump as if I was actually sitting on the pavement,
and had about as much power as a human-pedaled machine, groaning through
intersections, up bike lanes, and across giant lanes of traffic. Same old same
old.

Then things got interesting. When we got to my “destination,”
which I had shown him on my handy Beijing taxi guide app, he clearly had no
idea where to take me. He started asking me questions in Chinese, and all I
could do was show him where I wanted to go on my iphone map. He grabbed the
iphone and set out to accost passersby with questions about directions. I
worried that he might take off with the phone, even though I was sitting in his
parked vehicle. I’m figuring the unlocked iphone I bought back in the States is
about equal in value to his vehicle.

But like all Beijing drivers I’ve met, he was honest
and he came back with the phone. He pointed across Jianguomen, indicating we
were on the wrong side of the street. And then he turned the buggy around and
started heading back the way we came. We were riding in the bike lane, but
going in the wrong direction. It was at this point that I kind of wished I was
facing backwards so I couldn’t see my imminent death. I’m a pretty cool
customer in Beijing transportation, but this scared me.

And as we crossed against traffic in the
intersection, an enormous two-section bus roared directly at us. He swerved just in
time and finally deposited me on the other side, half ignoring my pleas to let
me off right there.

I arrived at my interview just a few minutes late, with my
hair all wild and my bag a jumble of items. It seems that there’s an inverse
relationship between my level of dishevelment and the polished nature of the
person I am interviewing. Today’s interview was an etiquette instructor. Yep,
we were a study in contrasts.

But the interview was fine, and on the way home I
tried to chat up my driver – in a regular yellow taxi this time. The minute I
said that today the air is good, he looked at me with such surprise I thought
he might drive off the road. And after he enthusiastically agreed, he started
singing. Just the fact that I had chatted with him seemed to make him insanely
happy. And that’s what I love about China. I challenge anyone to send me
evidence of their DC or NY cab driver serenading them.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

We went to a concert
last night by a rocker named Xie Tianxiao, a Mick-Jagger-thin guy who was
staging a kind of comeback from his grunge music of a good eight or so years
ago. The idea, which came from our friends Rachel and Scott, was that we had to
experience at least one rock concert during our time in Beijing, especially
since Workers Gymnasium, the concert venue, was just down the street from us.

The experience was
slightly more subdued than I expected. I had come to expect a whole lot of
technical razzle-dazzle from Chinese performances, glitz, sequins, dancers,
lights, sound. But Tianxiao seemed to be taking a page from the Bob Dylan
playbook: don’t talk much to the audience, don’t make any kind of big lead-up
to songs, don’t show any facial expression, and don’t ever smile.

The audience also
seemed rather subdued, at least at the beginning of the show. They sat there
and bopped their heads and their light sabers – the entrepreneurial spirit is strong
in China – and they even seemed to know all the words to all the songs. But they mostly stayed in their seats.

Then I figured out why.
As what must have been Tianxiao’s most popular song started, some of the kids
near the stage started dancing wildly. It was too much for the goons in green
khaki lined up at the front, and they grabbed the kids, wrestling them back
into their seats. It was all over in a moment. Eventually the kids towards the
front did manage to retrieve their enthusiasm, and stood waving their arms for
different songs, but I think the incident kind of toned them down just a bit.

One highlight was the
use of traditional Chinese instruments, which started out sounding like
something from Beijing Opera and moved into a straight rocker song. Here’s a
video of part of it. (Please ignore the thumb that pops up toward the end.) I
tried to capture the goons earlier, but they had stopped the action before I
could start taping.

Bob beat me to the
description of the whole event, so I’ll just add that Easter Sunday began with
a chill in the air (about 37 degrees) and air pollution that soon rose over
200. So even though there are a few cherry blossoms around town, I’m looking at
them through an eye-stinging haze that makes me a little depressed.

On a positive note, my
journey to retrieve the thumb drive I left at Friday’s conference resulted in
several full conversations in Chinese with drivers. These are still fairly
basic themes – how the city has grown, how old my children are, what the
weather is like today – but it’s definitely measurable progress. And every
driver is delighted to know I’m from America. “Meiguo, hen hao!” they all
exclaim. Can’t argue with that.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Today was kind of a typical day: I got to the gym,
and most of the treadmills were in use. The ones that were left over were clearly
out of service, so I had a minor temper tantrum right there in the gym, saying
to the attendants, “We pay a lot of money for this gym! You have three – SAN –
treadmills that are bu hao!” (My Chinese kind of falls apart when I’m mad.)

The attendants answered me in Chinese, which I heard
as “something, something, something, meiguo, something, something.”

This could mean several things:1.We’ve
ordered new treadmills from meiguo (America) and are waiting for them to
arrive.2.This
is not the kind of gym like the ones you have in meiguo, where things actually
work.3.If
you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to meiguo?

Eventually, I found a working treadmill, had my
workout, and headed back home. As I popped in the elevator, I noticed there’s a
man already inside the elevator, smoking a cigarette. I had another tantrum. “Really?”
I said, pointing at the cigarette. “You’re smoking in an elevator? You should
smoke OUTSIDE!” I said, as I pointed to the outdoors. He just looked back at me
with a blank expression, and I stomped off.

When I got home, I jumped in the shower. The shower
door fell off. Seriously, it just rolled right off its track and water poured
down on me and I wrestled with the glass to get it back on the track. And yes,
I did have enough sense to turn off the water before the door-wrestling, but
not before getting thoroughly drenched. That was fun.

My day improved after that. I went to a conference
not far from home and had a nice chat with the taxi driver about the weather,
the air quality, and generally what it’s like to drive a cab in Beijing. (Okay,
I made that last part up. He was talking about driving a cab – that much I
understood – but what his feelings were on that and how that related to the air
quality were just a bit beyond my comprehension. I pretend to know what they’re
talking about and they all compliment my Chinese, in the same way I
complemented my little Leah the other day for clapping her hands.)

The conference was fine, but the main reason I went
was to load some photos for a story I want to do on a thumb drive. Done. Until
I got home and realized I left the thumb drive sitting on the table at the
conference, which means I have to make yet another trip to retrieve it.

My first reaction was: How can I make this China’s
fault? There’s been a lot of talk in the press here lately about whiny
foreigners who are leaving the country because of the air pollution, the food
safety, the 20,000 pigs in the water, the Facebook-blocking, the usual. Not to
mention the no-heat-in-apartments, the lack of decent baked goods, the dog shit
on the sidewalks, and the fact that no one lets you get off the elevator or the
subway before they try to push on.

So with the accumulation of bad stuff, I can just
put my lamebrain move in the same column. China makes me stupid.

But it also makes for great material. It’s true I
might be clogging my brain with Mandarin, ruining my gut with gutter-oil-cooked
food, and coating my lungs with dust, but I’ve got such great material. Smudge
is at this moment sitting in the window and looking out at the Siberian magpies
in the leafless trees and the pink-sweatered miniature poodles on their
afternoon walks, and I realize that things could be worse.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Beijing is the kind of city where you'll see elderly folks being pushed in wheelchairs right in the middle of the street because the sidewalk is nonexistent, bumpy (and by bumpy I mean gaping holes), or filled with objects impossible to get around. Better to chance the stray car or scooter running down Grandma than to have to deal with so-called sidewalks that make walking an adventure all its own.

In the last couple of days, I've randomly shot scenes in my neighborhood so that people who don't live here can get a small sense of how taking an evening stroll can be as thrilling as a carnival ride. This isn't even touching on the topic of actually crossing the street, which is an altogether different sort of adventure. Today we'll start with Beijing's sidewalks.

Example one. This is one of the widest-open sidewalks I've seen, complete with the all-important yellow stripe intended to guide blind people. Wait, there's a car in the middle of the sidewalk? You haven't seen anything yet.

We've stepped up the game here. So what if there's a car parked in the middle of the stripe for blind people? It's still possible to squeeze past through the bike, the tree box, and the car. Easy.

Yes, this is a car parked right across the crosswalk. Added challenge are those black and yellow poles jutting up from the sidewalk. I think they may be to prevent people from parking there. I'm just guessing.

Slightly more of a challenge here. The car covers both the yellow stripe all the way to the tree box. Pity the poor trees that have to grow out of concrete mesh. But it's easier to step on that than on the mud inside a tree box.

Ahead you have a phone booth, a newspaper kiosk, and behind that a subway station. Pedestrians who have a destination on the other side of these things must weave around them.

What I love about this arrangement is the way the stripe for the blind person kind of juts around the telephone pole in the middle of the sidewalk.

Now things are getting interesting. Do you squeeze between the parked cars, or do you step way out into the narrow street and hope you don't get run over? If you're pushing a stroller or a wheelchair, good luck.

Monday, March 25, 2013

I've done multiple holidays and celebratory dinners
in Beijing, including two Thanksgivings and now my second Passover. This,
apparently, has given me the impression that I could step up the game a bit, go
a little fancy on this Passover meal. For instance, Bob still talks about the
year I made my own gefilte fish. And a matzo ball soup is always better with
homemade chicken stock. No matter that there isn't exactly a kosher for
Passover aisle in the supermarket, and things like matzo meal and horseradish need
to be ordered from the local Chabad network.

Okay then. The Passover Challenge began with a
visit by the Three Pengyous to Sanyuanli market. We three Pengyous -- me,
Rachel, and Nora -- set out with our bags, our warm winter hats, and a long
list. Other than specialty items like capers and semi-sweet chocolate chips, I
found everything I needed. Brisket, sea bass for the gefilte fish, dried
apricots, rosemary, thyme, parsley, dill, fennel bulbs, baby potatoes, and
mulberries in place of blackberries for the coulis that would be served with
the chocolate torte.

This was coming together nicely.

That is, until I actually started cooking. Purée
the berries with sugar in the food processor, said the recipe. So I loaded up
the food processor with mulberries and sugar, plugged it into the transformer,
and turned it on. Pffffit. Blew a fuse in the transformer, which was odd
because I've used it that way before. I replaced the fuse and tried again.
Pfffffit. Blew my last fuse. Now I had a half-smashed pulp of mulberries in the
processor and no more processor. Could it be because I had the oven running,
the washing machine going, and the heater going in the living room because
China has turned off our heat? Possibly.

I used my frustration to mash the mulberries and
later to whisk the eggs for the chocolate torte. But how I hand-chop the sea
bass into gefilte fish is still to be determined. Stay tuned. I haven't given
up yet. I also haven't figured out how to keep our ten dinner guests warm with
one space heater that has the power of a hair dryer. Eat more, drink more, I
guess. And when we tuck ten-month-old Leah to bed in the study, she's getting
the heater. This might make for the speediest Passover in history: 7 plagues
instead of 10 and three questions instead of four.

Update: So the Seder
worked out well, except for a few glitches. (For Bob’s take on the strange person
he calls Rabbi Bruno, ask him to put you on his In Lieu of Blog list: bob.davis@wsj.com.)

Glitch one was the beef. I’m
done with beef in this country. I bought what I thought was a nice brisket. And
you know how you can cook brisket until it’s falling apart and it’s delicious
and tender? Well, my so-called brisket had the consistency of shoe leather.
Actually, shoe leather would have been better. But my fish cakes tasted good,
even if they kind of fell apart in the process. Everything else was
satisfactory.

And Bob went out and
bought a second space heater, although there may have been, ahem, a guest who
ended up putting on a coat towards the end of the dinner. I guess it depended
on where you sat around the table.

Friday, March 22, 2013

As Passover approaches, we all recall that we are strangers
in a strange land. And boy, are we. This will be our second Passover in Beijing, but even so, we find that the strangeness of this strange land doesn’t
necessarily diminish with time. In fact, it can get stranger and stranger.

We celebrate Passover in our household by ordering kosher-for-Passover
items from the city’s Chabad network, shopping at the local wet market for
items like parsley and apples and walnuts, gathering every Jew we know, and
celebrating the Jews’ victory over Pharaoh with a festive dinner that will be
cleaned up by our ayi, cleaning lady, in the morning.

In many ways, Passover in China is a new exile in the
wilderness. “Let my people go” becomes “Just let me get on Facebook.” The Four
Questions become “Why does the heat in the apartment get turned off on March
15?”, “Is jian bing, the ubiquitous street pancake, kosher for Passover?”,
“Does Sichuan food count as bitter herbs?” and “Why are the Chinese chairs so
damned hard?”

And yes, there are the plagues. In place of the traditional
plagues, I think this year we’ll offer up a Chinese version for 2013. As we dip
our fingers in Great Wall wine and spill the drops on our plates, we’ll recount
these ten plagues.

2.(Frogs) A frog invasion in Wuhan spawns
fears of another earthquake.

3.(Lice) Parents treat head lice with Traditional
Chinese Medicine in place of Nix.

4.(Wild beasts) Giant pandas head to
extinction.

5.(Disease of livestock) Dogs are painted
to look like giant pandas.

6.(Boils) Whitening agents fill body
lotion.

7.(Hail) Spring sandstorms hit Beijing.

8.(Locusts) Mainland shoppers hit Hong
Kong.

9.(Darkness) Beyond-index air pollution
makes noon look like night.

10.(Death of the firstborn) Death of the
firstborn daughters results from the one-child policy.

In the story of Passover, God turns Aaron’s rod into a
serpent and the Pharaoh’s sorcerers turn their rods into snakes, which then get
swallowed by Aaron’s serpent. Since this is the year of the snake in the
Chinese calendar, that symbolism is appropriate, although the Chinese have a
knack of making their snakes look like chubby cherubs, less to smite the
Egyptians than to satisfy the endless hankering for kitsch.

We don’t know how long we’ll be in exile here, but I’ve lost
count of the number of times I do think “Dayenu – it would have been enough.”
What I tend to say, instead, is “bu yao.” Don’t want. Next year in 耶路撒冷.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Once again, I have been baffled by the elements of sudden
change and uncertainty in this country. Beijing is the kind of city where a restaurant you ate at one night can be closed the next day, where a three-month-old bookstore could close for renovations, and where many shops seem to be in a permanent state of half-renovation.

I went to get my hair cut at what I like to think of as Justin’s salon.
I figured I could spring for the expensive hair coloring at Julie’s, but there’s
no reason to forgo a 20-RMB haircut that is perfectly lovely.

But today, I walked into the salon, and there was no Justin.
Where’s Justin? I asked.

“Mei you,” answered the shop owner. No Justin.

“Is he coming back?” I asked.

“Mei you,” he said.

“Okay, but can you cut my hair?” I asked, gesturing.

“Keyi,” he said. Yes he can.

So I proceeded to get my hair cut by some non-Justin, silent
but efficient, who took as long to elaborately blow out my hair as he did to
cut it. The end result was fine, and so I decided I could live with returning
to the salon.

“Wo de mingzi,” I said after it was all done. My name – I knew
I had a fair amount of money prepaid for various services like eyebrows (which
won’t happen because Serena is also gone somewhere else) and hair color (which
won’t happen there because Justin botched the job last time. I see now his
heart was not in it.) Turns out I have more than 500 RMB left on my account. It’s
going to take me some time to spend that down 20 RMB at a time.

And then the mystery was solved. I came home and Joanna and
her friend Jamie were baking in the apartment. I told them Justin was gone, and
Jamie said she had Justin’s phone number (lots of people were Justin fans). She
texted him. He answered immediately: He had gone home for the new year and
decided to stay in his hometown of Changsha, in Henan province. Mei you Justin.
Jamie texted Justin that she was going to miss him. He texted back a picture of
a big bouquet of pink flowers.

Joanna’s theory was that Justin’s parents told him it was
high time for him to stay home and get married. It’s not entirely clear which
team Justin plays for, but I think that any boy who is sweet enough to text a
big bouquet of flowers is decent husband material.

And he sure could provide a lovely haircut. Chinese fails me
in this case. In fact, English does too. Au revoir, Justin. C’est dommage.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Yes, even Beijing gets spring – a brief, sandstormy, season
that sometimes means an improvement in air quality and the chance to be
outdoors. Washington, D.C. and Kyoto might have cherry blossoms, but we’ve got
signs of spring here too. (Revised with items I forgot -- thanks Joanna!)

1.The
spit no longer freezes on the sidewalks, melting into tiny glistening puddles
that almost sparkle in the sunlight.

2.The
mannequins in the windows of the sex shops show more of their alabaster skin
through their peekaboo negligees.

3.The
gardeners inside Seasons Park trim the trees and bushes to within an inch of
their lives.
4. The ayi decides to pack all your boots away inside the closet

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Here's the latest: a new and working air purifier was delivered to our apartment on Sunday, and it's now plugged in and whooshing away in the bedroom.

Ironically, Saturday's sandstorm, which left a layer of gray grit on my face, also seemed to push away the air pollution, and the air all day today has been good. I figure the purchase of an air purifier might have had the intended cosmic effect of making the air pollution leave, in the same way that it rains as soon as you wash your car. But $960 is a small price to pay for that.

Friday, March 8, 2013

I'm feeling defeated. I'm trying, I'm really trying to make my way here. And I'm studying Chinese, so I can't be accused of being one of those foreigners who lives in a bubble.

But today really hit me a little hard. First I was proud of myself for finally getting an air purifier, particularly when it arrived on a day when the air veered from hazardous to very unhealthy and spring sandstorms were in the forecast.

The purifier (a whopping $960) arrived just before I headed out the door to lunch. I counted out a fat pile of 100-rmb notes and sent the courier on his way. It wasn't until later that I got the chance to open the box and wrestle the long machine out. I finally got it out without ruining the box in the process (always a good idea in this land where Murphy's law was probably created), and plugged the baby in, waiting to hear the whoosh that would tell me it was working. Nothing.

I sent a text to the sales rep who called me immediately. Did the filter beep when I pushed it in? Nope. Was the light going on? Nope. We had, sitting elegantly in our bedroom, a very expensive piece of modern art that -- with its lime green trim -- actually matched the odd wallpaper.

Adam, the sales rep, said I should box up the machine, which was clearly defective, and a courier would pick it up and deliver a new one. In China, things break a lot, but the silver lining is that there's always someone to arrive to replace, repair, reinstate, and restore.

My doorbell rang and there stood a young man, clearly in a rush. He started barking orders at me in Chinese, thrusting a form at me. Adam meanwhile had emailed instructions but between the courier barking orders, and Adam trying to explain how to fill out the form, I was lost.

The courier took a look at my hastily filled in form and handed me a new blank one. At this point he was close to shouting, a scene made even more odd by the fact that Smudge watched tranquilly from the couch, as if she knew this had nothing to do with her.

And then he was gone, leaving the old machine sitting in the hall.

An hour later he returned. I handed him the new form, which he perused as he shouted into his cell phone and paced up and down the hallway. Would I pass? I stood in the door of the apartment for ten minutes while the courier paced and shouted, occasionally handing me the paper and then taking it back. Finally he pointed to a place where he indicated I should write my name -- I understood that much at least -- and he took off with the form and the machine.